Using Backbone to improve multiselects

Sometimes you need to ask a users for multiple answers to a single question. But what’s the best way to go about it?

Checkbox-field

A multiselect input field is kind of strange for the user, sticks out and doesn’t really behave like everything else on the web.

A bunch of checkboxes is better for the user … but have you ever tried handling a form with dynamically created checkboxes? Let alone creating useful tests and consolidating everything into a single list of values. No decent forms framework will let you do that easily.

What I really love about the Backbone approach is that all of this works almost magically. Instead of bending over backwards to get checkboxes and the hidden multiselect synced up, all I had to do was create some models, some views and tell them how they are connected.